


Photograph

by Delphi



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Established Relationship, Humor, M/M, Photographs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-21
Updated: 2012-07-21
Packaged: 2017-11-10 10:36:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/465320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two days into what he’s certain is going to be a regrettable term of employment at Hogwarts, Neville uncovers a stash of naughty photographs in his new suite.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Photograph

Neville found the photographs on his second unofficial day as a Hogwarts professor. The term was still a week away from starting, but he had arrived by train the morning prior and was currently having a small panic attack at the enormity of what he'd just signed up for.

It would have been the clichéd thing to say that the school hadn't changed at all in his absence, or that maybe it seemed smaller than he'd left it, but neither proved true. The last time he was here, much of the castle had still been in ruins and intermittently on fire, and along with the scores of repairs had come restorations and outbuildings that, if anything, made the school even more sprawling than before. Scaffolding still clung to one of the towers, and part of the east wing was closed off with large, hand-painted signs in Mr. Filch's forbidding 'This Means You' scrawl (and how poorly did it bode that he had stood up to Death Eaters here and yet was still secretly a little afraid of the caretaker?), but overall the school was as good as new or better.

He had been kindly greeted, of course. Professor Sprout had embraced him warmly before heaping last-minute instructions upon him, and Headmistress McGonagall had shaken his hand proudly, and Hagrid had pounded him on the back hard enough to knock him over. Everyone had been solicitous and welcoming, and everything had been going well, all things considered, until he presented himself for dinner and found himself transported back in time to the house he had grown up in: a table full of grey and balding heads, and him the only young person in shouting distance. 

Neville had only just started to think of himself as single, and now here he was among a cohort of widows and widowers, aged bachelors and spinst—career women, and soon enough the school was going to be flooded with a few hundred students who were young enough to be his...well, students. It presented an unexpected quandary. Three years in Auror training hadn't been conducive to dating, and when at the end of it he'd come to the conclusion that helping save the world once had really been enough for him, he'd felt far enough adrift that the letter from Professor McGonagall had seemed like a godsend. It would be just like going back to school, he'd thought. Except it wasn’t.

At least his rooms were a pleasant surprise. They were located in the dungeons, where the renovations had first been completed, but they were a lot bigger and more luxurious than anything he'd been able to afford in London. They were comfortably and cosily furnished, and they walked up a short set of stairs towards the greenhouses. The windows were high and narrow, leaving the room cool and dim in the lingering August heat, but he supposed September would soon bring short days, and that was what prompted him to move the tall wardrobe that was currently blocking half of the west-facing window. 

He hoisted it up and lugged it away from the wall, and he was just judging where best to put it when a faint wooden pop caught his attention. He set down the wardrobe immediately.

"Oh bugger," he said, inspecting the thing from all sides and trying to figure out how he'd broken what was undoubtedly a priceless antique. 

Something was sticking out the back. He crouched down for a better look and found a hidden drawer about the width of his hand. He pulled it open the rest of the way and carefully removed an old, worn envelope from inside. His years away from the school had only made him more cautious about the sorts of things that got hidden away in magical places, but the envelope was too yellowed and stiff to be under any substantial spells, and when he carefully opened it and peeked inside, he saw the edges of a small stack of photographs.

"Hullo," he murmured in surprise. He'd always had a weakness for other people's photographs. He supposed it came from the way he'd grown up, without his parents, with him and Gran and Great-Uncle Algie gathering around the family album the way other people gathered around the wireless. 

He tipped the photographs out and looked at the first one. Then he promptly dropped the whole stack in fumble-fingered shocked. Flustered, he gathered them up and looked at the top one again. He stood, biting his lip, and then went and made doubly certain the door was locked before bringing the photographs over to the bed, where the light was better.

That...certainly was a naked man.

He clucked his tongue as he sat down on the bed, embarrassed that this could still make him blush. He shouldn't have been surprised, really. What other kind of photographs did you bother to hide that well? 

On the bright side, he supposed it proved that this room wasn't regularly nosed around in. Back in the dormitories, Seamus's French postcards had never lasted more than a few days before Filch had somehow ferreted them out and confiscated them. That had been tame stuff by comparison: always women, often drawn rather than photographed, and usually only with their tops off. 

This photograph was quite old. It was in black and white, and it moved in the flickering manner that he associated with his parents' childhood photographs. Its subject was a young man lying on his back in a bed, with the sheets pushed down around his knees. One of his arms was above his head and the other rested across his stomach. If it had been posed, it was very good. He looked like he'd just been woken up and was put out by the interruption.

The young man was perhaps Neville's own age, maybe a little older. Not a student—he was too well-built and too developed for even a seventh year. His shoulders were broad, and his arms were muscular, like a Beater's. His chest was hairy, with a tapered trail leading down to a rather large penis. He had a plain sort of face, maybe a little brutish. His hair was dark and short, and his eyes were pale, squinting up at him—or at the photographer, rather—in mild annoyance before closing again.

* * *

_"Bugger off," he muttered, refusing to open his eyes and accepting the risk that it could be Pringle hovering over the bed. "M'sleeping."_

_"Let me take your photograph."_

_"Fine," he said. Then, when he heard an odd click and clank, he was forced to reluctantly peel back his tired eyelids and look up. "What—now?"_

_"Yes, now. My requisition for a school camera was finally put through, and I'd like to test it out on something."_

_He grunted and closed his eyes again. "Test it out on something that's not me."_

_"You're the one who was lying in wait for me, naked, in my bed."_

_"You're supposed to be in town, and your room's darker than mine, this time of day. And I took my clothes off so I didn't get your sheets all manky."_

_"Very thoughtful. But I would still be well within my rights to report you, so do co-operate."_

_The camera was one of those newfangled hand-held ones, and before he could protest, the covers were pulled down and the flash flared._

* * *

Neville looked at the headboard and then at the position of the windows. The bed had been against the other wall then, and the night table was different, but the photograph had unquestionably been taken in this room. And so had the next one, in which the same young man, now looking a little more awake but not any less annoyed, was propped up against the pillows, slowly wanking.

* * *

_"You’re a pervert," he grumbled._

_'Guilty as charged. Come on now—quick sticks. I need to see how this thing handles motion shots. We’ll be using it for Quidditch matches."_

_He set his jaw stubbornly._

_"Please? It’s very nearly my birthday, you know."_

_He sighed and, sitting up, gave his cock a rousing jiggle. All he’d wanted was a nice afternoon nap._

* * *

It occurred to Neville that this must have previously been a prefect's room. That was the only explanation, he decided as he flipped through a half-dozen shots of idle masturbation, growing hot in the face and rather constricted in the pants. The young man in the photograph might have been too old to be a student, but he wasn’t too old to be going out with a prefect or Head Girl—or Head Boy, even—and sneaking back onto school grounds to fool around and pose for dirty photographs. 

Neville himself knew how easy it was to get in and out of the school when you had the proper incentive.

* * *

_"I'm sure you can muster a little more vigour than that."_

_He paused in his strokes and flipped the V._

_"Oh, don’t be a bore. Sit up a little more. That’s it. Good lord, what I wouldn’t give for a stomach like yours."_

_"Try doing a lick of hard work for once in your life."_

_"Now where would the fun be in that? Although you’ve given me a splendid idea."_

* * *

Neville stared blankly at the next photograph. He turned it upside down and then back around, trying to figure out exactly what was going on. It had been taken from directly above, and all you could see was the top of the young man’s head—oh.

Oh.

All right. Head Boy. Definitely Head Boy. No pun even remotely intended. Neville fidgeted, adjusting himself, and then looked around guiltily. He couldn’t honestly be expected to give up masturbation just because the average age in the building was currently eighty, could he?

He popped a few crucial buttons and got his hand in his robes.

* * *

_He popped his mouth off and glowered sternly upwards. "If you drop that thing on me—"_

_"My hands are steady as a rock, dearest. Now if you will..."_

_He took him back in his mouth to the sound of the now-familiar whirr and click._

* * *

Neville glumly supposed he was going to become very good friends with his left hand in the years to come. How did you even go about dating when you worked at Hogwarts? Did you get Hogsmeade weekends free? It wouldn’t even be a consideration for the other professors, would it, and he could hardly be the one to ask if overnight guests were allowed. This really was the sort of thing he should have thought about before he signed his employment contract. 

His hand moved faster, and he licked his lips as he focused on the final photograph. In it, the young man lay reclined on the bed, and from out of frame, the photographer was stroking him off with a rather plump, pale hand. The photograph had captured the exact moment when its subject shot—a white arc spurting over his stomach—and Neville, moaning softly, watched it over and over again until his own orgasm followed.

* * *

_"That’s it..." he muttered, his hips rocking with every twisting stroke. "Go on. Faster, you limp-wristed pansy..."_

_"That's Professor Limp-Wristed Pansy to you, Argus dear."_

_"Fuck off—ah!" His eyes squeezed shut as he came, just in time to save him from the final flash._

_"You really do say the nicest things."_

* * *

"Er, I hope you don’t mind if I hold on to these," Neville said to the figure in the first photograph, which was once again scowling at him for interrupting his nap. He was accustomed to talking to photographs—another result of his unusual upbringing—although apologising to pictures of strangers was new. “I wouldn’t feel right throwing you on the fire, and I don’t think I could turn these in anywhere. I’m not sure anyone here has even heard of sex. It would probably cause a scandal."

He tried to picture giving these to Professor McGonagall. Who would surely look at them. And know that he had looked at them. Filch ran a lost and found bin, but who would come looking for these after what had to be nearly forty years? Besides, he might well forget that Neville was a professor now and give him a detention. The only halfway worldly type Neville could remotely conceive of handing these over to was Professor Slughorn, who would probably nudge him with a friendly elbow and one of his unnerving chuckles. At least until he opened up the envelope and found something much less gentlemanly than he’d probably been imagining—or much more gentlemanly, depending on how you looked at it.

The sound of footsteps echoed in the corridor, and Neville scrambled to shove the photographs into the bedside drawer.

* * *

Horace whistled a cheery little tune of his own devising as he wandered through the dungeons, checking on the preparations in the dormitories and the classrooms. He ambled past his old set of rooms, down the corridor and around the corner, to where Argus was perched on a ladder, repairing a sconce. He smiled to himself and then pinched Argus’s arse firmly as he passed.

"Oi!" The ladder rattled, and Argus glared at him.

"Do be careful," Horace said innocently. "That thing looks terribly rickety."

He ignored the fervent grumbling behind him as he continued on his stroll, and he smiled to himself, certain that appropriate payback would be forthcoming. Perhaps in his bedroom, later tonight. 

On many rubrics, Horace reflected, school life could not hope to compare to the wild and wonderful world beyond, but he did not regret returning to his vocation. Widows and widowers, aged bachelors and spinsters—there was no place like Hogwarts for getting regularly laid.


End file.
